Manual labor movies? (halp me pls)
You know those instances where you feel you could rattle off a hundred examples of something, but as soon as you're in a position where you actually have to come up with an example of that thing, you can't?
I'm looking for examples of movies that check one or more of these boxes:
- Manual labor is used as punishment or public deterrent.
- The bodies of laborers signify the types of labor they do (weathered hands, sensory impairments, crooked posture, etc.)
- An underclass is subjected to environmental hazards that affect their bodies or behavior (e.g., lead poisoning, Mako eyes).
- Generally, a movie in which someone's socioeconomic position marks their body or behavior in a readily legible way like certain accents, dialects, and dictions do, only the mark is visually rather than auditorially readable.
Never Let Me Go and The Island are close to the type of thing I'm looking for. Jaws is almost there. Modern Times and The Wrestler are closer. Spirited Away is in the wheelhouse, too. Do the Riddick movies participate in something like this with blindness being a product of working as a miner? Anything else come to mind?
Thanks!
Manual labor movies? (halp me pls)
Star Trek VI
Temple of Doom
Manual labor movies? (halp me pls)
Great thread. I can think of three examples not yet mentioned off the top of my head:
Django Unchained
Enemy Mine
No Escape (the Ray Liotta sci-fi original, not the recent film with Lake Bell and Owen Wilson)
In both Django Unchained and Enemy Mine, the protagonist is captured and sent to work in a mine at the end of the second act, which sets up the conflict in their respective third acts. (And please, if for some reason you haven't seen Enemy Mine, go do it now.)
In No Escape, Ray Liotta is a soldier who kills his CO and gets shipped to a prison island to do manual labor.